Mid-20th-century American institutionalism

An anthropological version of economic institutionalism emerged later in the work of Karl Polanyi. Influenced by the GHE, he argued that economic relations are historically contingent and cannot be understood outside of their social context. For Polanyi, economics is always embedded in society. Rather than economic relations producing social integration, Polanyi argued, the social background, and institutions in particular, integrated the economy. According to this logic, markets are not the product of spontaneous acts of exchange. Instead, personal-level acts of exchange produce prices only under a system of price-making markets—a system that cannot arise solely from random acts of exchange. Historically, the market system is a relatively recent innovation and only one of several, contingent institutional solutions to the problem of economic integration. Additional forms of integration are reciprocity (e.g., lend-lease) and redistribution (e.g., the Soviet Union).

Polanyi defined institutions broadly as uniting, stabilizing, and giving structure to the economic process. Although economic institutions such as price and money are important, Polanyi also stressed the importance of noneconomic institutions such as religion and government. Haggling over price and individual choice are understood as a product of institutions; this foreshadows later sociological institutionalists (SI) who see human behaviour as following a “logic of appropriateness” and institutions as creating identities. Like his predecessors, Polanyi rejected the idea that contemporary economic science can universally capture economic relations.

Institutionalism also appeared in political science during the mid-20th century, when American political science was dominated by the study of democratic progress in the United States. Analysis of other countries was rare. Nevertheless, theorists such as Carl J. Friedrich focused on institutions in their cross-national work on constitutionalism. For Friedrich, constitutionalism was characterized by both a concern for individual autonomy and institutional arrangements—divided government and federalism—to prevent the concentration of power, especially in the state. Institutions are the rules of politics and the instruments of their enforcement. However, Friedrich was careful to note that institutions must reflect social and political reality, and without belief in their legitimacy they are greatly weakened. Friedrich sharply contrasted modern constitutionalism from nonconstitutional systems such as totalitarianism, and his work on the latter influenced an entire generation of Sovietologists. Finally, he was also interested in questions of institutional crafting, although he was agnostic about the existence of a “universal common denominator” for institutional design. Friedrich’s insights can be seen in both HI and RCI.

Institutionalism appeared in sociology with the emergence of organizational science (OS), which was a response to the rapid growth in the size of firms starting in the 1860s. The earliest and most influential figure was Chester Irving Barnard, who in the 1930s argued that an organization is a complex system of cooperation and highlighted the need to understand the behaviour of the individuals that compose it. He identified a disconnect between an organization’s conscious system of coordination (formal aspects) and its unconscious processes (informal aspects). The latter include customs, habits, attitudes, and understandings. The role of the executive is to create open communication and inducements for individual members.

Barnard stressed the importance of nonmaterial inducements, which facilitated individuals’ carrying out orders without consciously questioning authority. From this perspective, a manager directs the values of the organization so that individuals work toward a common purpose. He also argued that organizational forms vary across organizations because the configuration of individuals is unique to each organization, as is the appropriate organizational solution.

Institutionalism revisited

After World War II, institutionalism lost some of its prominence in the social sciences, displaced by theories focusing on social structures or individual behaviour. In the 1980s, however, research on social structures led to a revival of interest in institutions and the emergence of new institutionalism (NI). Theorists of comparative politics suggested that the state was autonomous and called for bringing the state back in as an explanatory variable. The study of institutions was significantly advanced with research in political economy on the state-led development of the Asian NIEs, as well as institutional reforms in the developed countries. Researchers also became increasingly interested in cross-national comparison of institutions, with a view to understanding the process of democratization. Finally, the global expansion of capitalism and European Union (EU) integration led to significant research demonstrating the role of institutions as intermediaries between structures and outcomes.

Some social scientists explicitly referenced earlier institutional works in their call for bringing institutions back in. This new body of work that came to be labelled NI sought to investigate among other things the interaction of society and institutions, the sources of institutional coherence, how historical processes lead to delayed outcomes, and nonutilitarian models of behaviour.

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